Positron emission tomography (PET) is a diagnostic imaging modality that is used to non-invasively measure the bio-distribution of a radioactive tracer. In PET, a positron emitting bare radioactive isotope or an isotope that has been attached to a chemical molecule is injected into a patient or animal. A positron is emitted by the radioactive isotope and annihilates with an electron producing two photons in opposite directions. Each of the photons has approximately 511 keV of energy, corresponding to the mass of the positron and electron. These two annihilation photons escape the patient and interact in a scanner that is positioned around the patient.
A scanner is made of arrays of high energy photon detectors that convert interactions in the detector into electrical signals that are processed on a computer. An example of a high energy photon detector is a scintillation crystal that is connected to at least one optical photodetector such as a photomultiplier tube. The 511 keV annihilation photon can interact in the high-Z dense scintillation crystal, which in turn emits blue photons that bounce inside of the scintillation crystal. The blue optical photons then hit a photodetector which converts the light into an electrical signal. The electrical signal is then processed by analog and digital electronic circuits and is recorded as an event. The electronics process the signal and record the time, location of the crystal that was hit, and the energy of high energy annihilation photon to storage. In positron emission tomography, the two photons are paired to produce a line-of-response (LOR) of the interaction. These LORs are processed by image reconstruction algorithms to produce 3-D images of the distribution of the radiotracer.